All great achievements are the product of commitment. Learn more about UBC’s nine commitments by visiting the university’s Place and Promise Plan, reviewing the full annual report for progress and metrics, and exploring the stories below to see how students, faculty, staff, and alumni are bringing the commitments to life.

Community Engagement

The University serves and engages society to enhance economic, social, and cultural well-being.

What can we create together?
Peter Block

UBC exists for the communities it serves: local, provincial, national, and global. An integral part of those communities, the University enters into relationships where decisions about means and ends are made collaboratively, costs and benefits are shared, and learning is reciprocal. Beginning with interest and outreach and moving through engagement and empowerment, UBC recognizes degrees of commitment and nurtures relationships along the full spectrum. With multiple sites and a global reach, UBC dedicates its resources to dialogue and action on issues of public priority. As international acclaim for its community engagement grows, the University honours the time and effort that goes into building respectful community relationships and expands the notion of scholarship to embrace community engagement as both core to the university’s mission and foundational to excellent teaching, learning and research. Community engagement brings the full force of our combined experiences, expertise, and knowledge to bear on the salient questions of our time. Is there anything that, together, we cannot create?

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